Mandriva LE--The Drake Flies South for the Future - page 3

The Obligatory Lawyer Razzing

May 2, 2005

By
Bill von Hagen

Figure 3 shows the default Mandriva KDE desktop with a single xterm
displayed. Mandriva provides a nice theme and background with easily
interpreted and attractive icons.

The following table shows the versions of some of the most popular
GNU/Linux software packages found in the Mandriva Limited Edition
release. As the release notes for this release state over and over,
this release focuses on installing stable, patched, and tested
versions of popular Linux packages, not necessarily the latest and
greatest. For those new to Linux, this table lists the versions of the
Evolution mail client, the binutils, GCC, GDB, and Glibc packages for
compilation and debugging, the GNOME and KDE desktop systems and their
graphical underpinnings in the X Window System, the Perl and Python
scripting languages, the Open Office desktop productivity software
package, the Linux kernel itself, and the RPM package management
system.

Package

Version

binutils

2.5.1a-1

Evolution

2.0.4

Firefox

1.0.2-3

GCC

3.4.3-7

GDB

6.3-3

GIMP

2.2.4-5

Glibc

2.3.4-8

GNOME

2.8.3

KDE

3.3.2

Kernel

2.6.11-6

OpenOffice.org

1.1.4

Perl

5.8.6-6

Python

2.4-5

RPM

4.2.3-9

X Window System

6.8.2-7

As you can see from this list, Mandriva LE provides an interesting
combination of stability and hot-off-the-compiler software, which I
think is a wise move for the first branded release by what is
essentially a new company. Having the latest and greatest of
everything isn't as important as demonstrating a stable release that
improves upon past products, while demonstrating a commitment to the
future. Though by default a KDE-oriented distribution, Mandriva
installs a fairly recent and complete version of GNOME--something
that many KDE-oriented distributions fail to do.

Though the version of KDE used in Mandriva is somewhat old in Linux
terms (i.e., it wasn't compiled yesterday), Mandriva has also made
some interesting improvements in core functionality. For example, the
version of KDM used on Mandriva is theme-able in the same way that GNOME
fans have been able to theme GDM. While not earth-shattering, this is
a nice improvement that is both fun and can be quite useful in
academic or enterprise deployments.